Getting vocabulary from a tweet

You never know what you’re going to pick up from following tweets from pop culture icons like @jesseyjoy or @juanes, or from news sources like Venezuela’s version of Fox News @globovision or Honduran @diariolaprensa. A great tweet came through today as an example.

One of my favorite groups, the Mexican trio Camila, tweets mainly through two accounts, @pablocamila (the guitarist) and CamilaMX, the official twitter. Mario Domm has an account @dragondomm but he doesn’t tweet terribly frequently.

In less than 140 characters, you have the vocabulary word ‘tocayo’ (I don’t know when I acquired that word but it’s a fun one to have), future for the concept of “I wonder” (extra interesting in the ir + a construction), cuál instead of qué as the question word, and the whole phenomenon of this prognosticating octopus Pulpo Pablo, which is frankly, just flat weird, but hey–by the time you watch videos and read articles about him choosing Spain to win it all (as of this writing the game is tomorrow, so we’ll see if he’s right), and why not throw in some video of Spain searching for their own Pulpo Paul, not to mention the wealth of hilarious stuff there is to find out there about Argentinian chefs putting octopus paella on the menu ad nauseum, your students will never forget the word for octopus and get some really funny culture mixed in their language acquisition in the process.

Every Spanish teacher should be on Twitter. Start by following me, @secottrell, and looking at my lists of language teachers and music, and follow them. From there it’s a yellow brick road.

Awww, mil gracias! I use TweetDeck to organize my tweets, and once in a long while, Twitterfall.com. In Tweetdeck I can have four columns on my screen at once, so I have my friends' tweets on the left, then my "mentions" (who has mentioned me), then direct messages, then my facebook feed. When an interesting conference is going on, I click on the + button at the top, which is the search button. Last month I added the search column #ISTE10 (International Society for Technology in Education). So people who were at that conference were tweeting links and suggestions and adding that #ISTE10. I had the search column added to Tweetdeck. You can use the arrows on the bottom to move columns left or right, so I moved it left until it replaced my facebook column on my screed. During the whole conference, every time someone tweeted using #ISTE10, it showed up in that column for me. You can do that all the time if you want, using, for example, #edchat, #edtech, #mfl, #worldlang, #interactive, or anything that interests you. I hope that was transparent enough! 🙂